With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, including cellphone devices, handheld devices, handheld computers, smartphones, PDAs, etc., there is a need for improving the user interface experience by increasing user input entry speed, reducing entry errors, and improving the overall user experience.
Mobile devices with capacitive or resistive touch capabilities are well known. Modern mobile phones have evolved over recent years to the point where they now possess a broad range of capabilities. They are not only capable of placing and receiving mobile phone calls, multimedia messaging (MMS), and sending and receiving email, they can also access the Internet, are GPS-enabled, possess considerable processing power and large amounts of memory, and are equipped with high-resolution color liquid crystal displays capable of detecting touch input. As such, today's mobile phones are general purpose computing and telecommunication devices capable of running a multitude of applications. For example, modern mobile phones can run web browser, navigation system, media player and gaming applications.
Along with these enhanced capabilities has come a demand for larger displays to provide a richer user experience. Mobile phone displays have increased in size to the point where they can now consume almost the entire viewing surface of a phone. To increase the size of displays any further would require an increase in the size of the phones themselves.
Additionally, the content of a page to be displayed typically is much larger than the display area itself. As a result, a portion of the content is on the display and the remaining portion is outside the viewing area (i.e., hidden from view) so that the user must scroll to see all of the content. Typically, scrolling is achieved through a flick operation where the user's finger is dragged across the display so as to scroll the previously hidden portions into view. As the additional content is hidden, the user does not know whether to flick left, right, up or down to view the remainder of the content. Thus, the hidden content becomes problematic as the user might have to experiment and search for it, which contradicts the goal of making the user interface a “friendly” environment.